Friday, February 24, 2012

As the Simpson family prepared to
travel south of the equator to Brazil, Homer revealed some
misconceptions. In opposite land, according to Bart's father, "warm snow
falls up." Reading the latest press releases and speeches from the
Department of Education, sometimes I feel as if this is where we have arrived.

For the past two years, the Department of Education policies have been
roundly criticized by teachers. The latest response from Arne Duncan is a big
public relations push bearing the title RESPECT -- Recognizing Educational
Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching.

However, as in Homer's opposite-land, everything seems to be upside
down.

The Department has solutions to each of these problems - but they
often have pursued policies that actually make things worse. Here are the
problems, and the solutions the Department of Ed has offered -- many of which
are mandatory if states wish to qualify for Race to the Top or escape the
ravages of NCLB:

Problem #1: "Many of our schools of education are mediocre at best. A
staggering 62 percent of young teachers say they felt unprepared to enter the
classroom."

Solution: Evaluate schools of education based on the test scores of the
teachers they graduate. Use VAM scores to rate schools of education, and remove
funding from those that do not produce teachers with sufficiently high VAM
ratings. Since VAM ratings have been shown to be lower among teachers of
English Language learners and special education students, programs that place
teachers in these classrooms are likely to do poorly. All schools of education
will feel significant pressure to prepare their teachers to focus on test
scores.

Problem #2: "Many teachers are poorly trained and isolated in their
classrooms."

Solution: Continue to support programs such as Teach For America, which places
novice teachers in the most challenging classrooms with only five weeks of
training.

Problem #3: "Teachers are given little time to succeed--and they are under
increasing pressure to get results to meet accountability targets."

Bizarre. What agency of the federal government made competitive grants and the
continuation of federal funding contingent on whether states created evaluation
programs like the one released last week in New York, that will result in
teachers being fired after two years of poor VAM ratings?

Problem #4: "Not enough principals know how to attract, nurture, and let
blossom the great teachers that they have in their buildings."

Solution: Pressure states to dictate to principals exactly how they must
evaluate their teachers, resulting in highly specific and onerous systems,
generating piles of paperwork and little real support for teachers. The New York Times
reported last fall on Tennessee's system, praised by
Secretary Duncan for leading the way.

"In the five years I've been
principal here, I've never known so little about what's going on in my own
building." Mr. Shelton has to spend so much time filling out paperwork
that he's stuck in his office for long stretches.

Problem #5: "While high-performing nations almost universally have a high
bar to entry--rejecting as many as nine in ten applicants who want to teach in their
countries--here in the U.S. we basically allow anyone to teach, and often train
and support them poorly."

Solution: Provide a grant in the
amount of $50 million to the already well-funded Teach For
America program, encouraging them to expand into areas that have no shortage of
qualified teachers.

Problem #6: "Here in the U.S., evaluation is too often tied only to test
scores, which makes no sense whatsoever." This is actually a clever
feint. In fact, here in the US, teacher evaluation has NOT been tied to
test scores, even in part. But the Department of Education PR experts want to
pretend that they advocate some sort of middle course. They OPPOSE evaluating
teachers ONLY on test scores, and merely want scores used as one of the "multiple
measures" of teacher quality. But this is a straw man. Show
me a school or a state where evaluations have been based "only on test
scores." Opposite land. No such place exists. It is the Department of
Education that has required that states mandate the use of test scores in
teacher evaluations as a condition of NCLB waivers.

Problem #7: "Instead of a safety net beneath our children and teachers,
test-based accountability has become a sword hanging overhead." Indeed!
And who sharpened the sword and demanded it be hung on the slender thread of
VAM ratings? The Department of Education, through Race to the Top and now the
NCLB waiver process.

Problem #8: "Too many schools resemble 19th century factories that treat
all teachers and students alike, rather than establishing creative learning
environments designed to address the individual needs of students and the
personalized developmental needs of teachers."

The Department of Education continues to require states to use test
scores to identify the bottom 5% to 15% of schools, and subject those schools
to the "turnaround" trauma we have seen fail in Chicago and
elsewhere. Schools with large numbers of students in poverty will continue to
feel intense pressure to raise test scores, until we stop measuring success
this way, and stop believing the way to motivate and support people is by
threatening to fire them. Problem #9: "Both the teacher work day
and work year are too short to get the job done and allow for the kind of
professional collaboration teachers want and the learning time that students,
particularly disadvantaged students, desperately need."

Solution: Require teachers to work longer hours, extending the school day, as
has been done in Chicago, though there is
little research showing this will work. And though the
Department of Education speaks of increased compensation for this work, how
many states are allocating additional funds to increase teacher pay these days?
And how many are looking to cut costs, while increasing our work loads?

Solution: Eliminate the use of seniority as a means of determining layoffs.
Instead use "job performance," a significant part of which will now
be based on test scores. When protected by seniority, a teacher knows that she
cannot be dismissed unless there is clear evidence she is not doing the job.
Under the new evaluation systems, as in New York, two years of bad VAM scores
in a row and you are out the door.

Problem #11: "Compared to other important professions, teacher salaries are
far too low to attract and retain top college students into the field and
barely sufficient for existing teachers to raise a family, buy a home, and
maintain a middle class lifestyle. Many teachers must work side jobs or rely on
their spouses to make ends meet. Something is radically wrong with that
picture."

Solution: The Department actually has no solution to this at all. They have
nothing to do with the funding that is used for teacher salaries, and have done
nothing at all to address inequities in funding between wealthy and poor
districts, even as the gaps there have widened. But doesn't it make you feel
great when Secretary Duncan
tells us some of us ought to be earning $150,000 a year?

Problem #12: "Finally, good teachers often must leave the classroom--leave
what they love most and what they do best--to acquire more responsibility,
advance professionally, and increase earnings. Many simply leave the
field."

Solution: Pay people more if they raise test scores or take on more leadership.
I support the leadership aspect of this. If teachers take on additional
responsibilities, they should be paid accordingly. Unfortunately the lion's
share of this sort of funding has gone into pay-for-test score schemes, while
the Department of Education has cut funding for real leadership programs like
the National Writing Project and the National Board for Professional Teaching
Standards. And all the test-centered policies described above will drive
teachers from the profession, in spite of all the rhetoric.

Another interesting element of the RESPECT program is this. We
teachers have long been clamoring for a seat at the table where decisions are
made about schools. The Department has a cadre of Teacher Ambassador Fellows
who work under the Office of
Communications and Outreach, who are currently holding round
table discussions with teachers around the country. But Secretary Duncan gave
us a clue about the voices who will be heard the best:

The conversation will be on blogs, in the
media, and in town halls like this one. We will engage our union partners at
every level--national, state and local--as well as teacher reform groups, like
Teach Plus, Educators for Excellence, and the New Teacher Project.

Interesting. Our unions have been a real mixed bag when it comes to
these deals. But the three teacher "reform" groups mentioned are
another story. All three are heavily funded by the Gates Foundation, and all
three have played significant roles in pushing for the increased use of test
scores in teacher evaluations.

Teach Plus
played a key role in bringing teachers to testify in favor of
Senate Bill 1, which passed last year in Indiana. Their goal there was to
protect "promising young teachers" from layoffs, by supporting a
system that would base layoffs instead on evaluations that are tied to test
scores.

Educators 4
Excellence recently took credit for the new evaluation plan in
New York. Their leader, Evan Stone, said the following last week:

For the last two years we have been
waiting for an evaluation system that gives us meaningful feedback, and now we
might have one...This is a huge step forward for teachers and students in New
York, and its because of your voices that it happened. This entire policy
proposal is based on the ideas of last year's E3 policy team, and it's your
effort that got it included in the budget amendment today. But we're not done
yet. We need to keep pushing and make sure our voice is heard.

...one sentence in the agreement shows
what matters most: "Teachers rated ineffective on student performance
based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall." What
this means is that a teacher who does not raise test scores will be found
ineffective overall, no matter how well he or she does with the remaining sixty
percent. In other words, the 40 percent allocated to student performance
actually counts for 100 percent. Two years of ineffective ratings and the
teacher is fired.

The last group mentioned by Secretary Duncan, The New Teacher Project, is yet another
Gates-funded group. TNTP was founded back in 1997 by Michelle Rhee, and got
this whole teacher evaluation mania rolling with their 2009 report, The Widget Effect.

So it is very telling that these are the three organizations given
special mention by Secretary Duncan.

The crazy-making thing about all this is that teachers are not stupid. We know when we are
being systematically disrespected. We know that in order to have a career in
teaching, we need some degree of security. We cannot survive if our jobs depend
on constantly rising test scores. The supposed "bargain" we have been
given is one that makes our work, especially those of us in high poverty
schools, all about test scores. The Department of Education is attempting to
create a reality distortion field, where we will somehow believe the spin,
mistake all these new mandates for "flexibility," and miss the fact
that all these terrible test-scored-driven policies being introduced across the
nation are driven by their policies.

Bad news, Homer. We are not in opposite land. Here in the USA, cold
snow falls down, and test scores are indeed a sword hanging over our heads. And
the agency most responsible for this is the US Department of Education. Real
respect is all about being forthright and truthful. We will know it when we
hear it.

Note: Lest I be accused of lacking solutions, allow me to once again refer
readers to the report I helped write a couple of years ago, A Quality
Teacher in Every Classroom, which offers detailed proposals
regarding teacher evaluation.

What do you think of Secretary Duncan's RESPECT campaign?

Anthony
Cody's latest blog on Ed Week, is a scathing expose of Arne Duncan
and the DOE's doublespeak when it comes to education reform. As
one commentor noted, Duncan, like his predecessor Spellings is dishonest and/or
incompetent or both.